A Slave's Tale (MM)
by bdfreak
Summary: In the Underdark city of T'lindhet, a human slave-boy finds himself catching the eye of a powerful drow warlord.
1. A Strange Encounter

CHAPTER 1 - A STRANGE ENCOUNTER

Some five thousand meters beneath Faerûn's renowned Gnollwatch Mountains, a war was being waged in the Underdark city of T'lindhet.

This was no ordinary conflict though, and for the first time in centuries, noble houses had temporarily put their differences aside and had come together in the hopes of surviving the city-wide crisis that threatened to destroy them.

With Lolth's silence continuing to cause unrest in the drow populace and the city's iron-fisted reign over the surface-dwelling people of Dambrath being cut short, an organised slave revolt was probably unavoidable.  
But this wasn't a small scale revolt.  
Quite the opposite, in fact.

Thousands of derro, orcs, goblins, kobolds, umber hulks, half-ogres and other lesser creatures had banded together under the dictatorship of a self-appointed duergar chieftain and his army of rebels.

With an entire section of the cavern-city being overrun by the rebellious slaves and their bloodthirsty minions, these were uncertain times for the heavily outnumbered drow...especially now that the Spider Queen had seemingly abandoned her minions and left even the most fervent of priestesses in the dark and without powers.

After weeks of cashing in defeat after defeat, the city's ruling council finally organised a campaign to crush the slave revolt, sending the remnants of their heavily-brainwashed cannon fodder as shock troops before marching in on the slave-ghetto itself.

A fierce battle ensued, but the better-trained and better-equipped drow forces quickly crushed the slave rebellion, forcing the savage beasts to execute their own leader and publically display his severed head as a sign of surrender. As hopeful as they may have been about the end of hostilities, the slave population that had overrun the lower tiers of the city were slaughetered and shown no mercy.

The few that were recaptured were publically tortured and put on display in the center of the city plaza, probably to disuade any further rebellion from the remaining slave populace, who's numbers were at an all time low.

The Weapons Master of T'lindhet's fifth ruling house, Tsabrak Rhomduil, was among those that returned victorious from the military campaign to retake the lower tiers of the city.

In the hours that followed the massacre, the abnormally tall Weapons Master and his battlehardened troops were put in charge of sweeping through the market district and acting as a military presence in a part of the city that had been caught between the revolting slave's and the noble house armies.

Armed with a spear and seated on his riding lizard, the mighty drow warlord took little joy in impaling the kobolds, orcs and the other lesser creatures that were scampering about to get out of his way. These louts simply weren't worth his time and skill.

With the slave revolt's defeat, commoners and foot soldiers were filtering out of their homes, hungry to exact revenge on any non-drow their could get their hands on. It didn't matter if the creature in question was loyal to it's drow overseers or not. Every free-roaming slave was a viable target.

To the skilled Weapons Master however, this was hardly an excersise worthy of time.

Patrolling the streets was a lowly job for a noble of his status, and Tsabrak would've much rather been enjoying a scented bath in his private quarters or training with his students in the house gymnasium.

A large number of shops and stalls had been ransacked and pillaged during the battle, but most drow nobles didn't care about the lower merchant classes and the plight they now found themselves in.  
Not until it affected the flow of fine wares and exotic goods to their houses, that is.

Just as he was about to call it a day and signal for his troops to head back to house Rhomduil's main gates, Tsabrak spotted something uncanny in the distance.

Spurring his lizard forward towards the alchemist shop that had been one of his regular go-to stores over the past century, the six-foot-tall battle veteran disembarked from his mount and slowly made his way towards the corpse of the old merchant he'd developed a passing familiarity with.

The man was dead, stabbed to death by a orcish blade and left to bleed out on the street in front of his shop.  
The old drow's potion store had been ransacked and emptied of healing salves, likely by the same slave forces who'd looted nearly every other shop in the area.

Tsabrak felt no pity for the man.  
He deserved no sympathy for being too weak to defend himself against beings of lesser intellect.

The fate of the old merchant wasn't of interested to him though.

Rather, it was the small human boy that wept and clung to the dead man's body that perplexed the approaching Weapons Master.

He'd seen the boy before.  
During his last three visits to the merchant's shop, the child had been there, acting as the old drow's assistant.

While humans were something of a rarity in the city of T'lindhet, Tsabrak never paid the lad much attention, until now.

Even with three centuries of knowledge and experience under his belt, the Weapons Master of house Rhomduil didn't know much about these creatures.

He knew they were short lived, he knew they outnumbered every other race in Faerûn and built massive cities up on the surface.  
But aside from that, he, like most drow, didn't know much about these strange surface dwellers and their bizarre customs.

The boy was young, possibly ten or eleven by human years.  
Unlike the few Dambrathian humans he'd seen over the course of his life, this child's skin was pale.  
Even more notable was the boy's golden hair and striking blue eyes.

Tsabrak approached the merchant's lifeless corpse, but instead of fleeing or recoiling in fear, the child simply looked up at him with tear-filled eyes and pressed a blood-soaked cloth over it's master's forehead.  
The boy either didn't realise the old drow was dead, or simply didn't want to believe it.

Impressed by the child's devotion to his Master, Tsabrak saw no reason to end the boy's life...especially considering how the city's remaining slave population would become critical in replenishing the unskilled labour taskforce.

"Please...help him." the child whimpered, speaking in drow and looking up at the approaching soldier with large, hopeful blue eyes.

It was common knowledge among the drow that humans made the most devoted and loyal slaves, but to actually witness the level of devotion and emotional attachment this creature had to it's owner, was quite simply stunning.

"Your Master is dead, child." Tsabrak finally spoke, forcing to boy to look down at his mentor's corpse and accept what he no doubt already knew.

After letting the sobbing boy recite some sort of foreign prayer over the lifeless corpse of his Master's body, the armoured Weapons Master picked the lad up and saddled him onto his riding lizard before exiting the street and rejoining his lieutenants as they patrolled the route leading up to the city's upper tier.

The human boy was auctioned off at the open slave market and Tsabrak ended up getting a hefty sum from the slaver who bought him.

All in all, a fairly good day for the Weapons Master of house Rhomduil. 

Little did Commander Tsabrak know his path would once again come to cross that of the young human boy he'd just sold off.


	2. Early Years

CHAPTER 2 - EARLY YEARS

Life as a nineteen-year-old human boy living in T'lindhet wasn't ALL bad.

I'd been taken when I was very young, and the fact that I didn't remember much of my former life up in the sun-kissed world above actually helped quite a bit.

Don't get me wrong. Living in this city as a non-drow was like living in a nightmare.  
But unlike many of the other forced labourers working alongside me, this was the only life I'd known.

This life I led, or rather, this life I was being _forced_ to lead yielded rather few privileges.

Even so, as the years went by, it became blatantly obvious that my heritage shielded me from suffering the same gruesome fates as some of my "less fortunate" comrades; the goblins, the orcs, the kobolds and the other mindless creatures our Masters usually employed.

Our dark overlords loathed us for what we were; inferior, lowly beings fit only for death and servitude.

But the truth of the matter remains; their entire society could not function without us.  
The dark elven Masters depended on us for everything from agriculture, to sewage, and even in some cases, craftsmanship. 

During my dealings with the various Master's I'd had over the years, it also became obvious that most drow did not harbor wanton hatred for my people. Oh don't get me wrong, they absolutely disliked me.  
I just wasn't treated as bad as many of the others.

I was almost always awarded some sort of special treatment that somewhat set me apart from the other slaves and servants.

Sometimes it would come in the form of extra food or extra baths. Other times I'd be granted extra sleep.

I never had any off days. Ever.

But having lived this life since I was old enough to walk on my legs, I probably wouldn't know what to do with myself if I was given free time.

Besides the rather vague memories of what my biological parents looked like, I'd seen only two humans by the time I reached adolescence.

One of them had been a trader or a merchant from the surface.  
The other had been a mage, at least, that's what I gathered from the way he was dressed.

I still remember the day I saw that man.

His facial features were of no interest to me. Rather, it was his attire and the prestige and authority it commanded that fascinated me so.

Long flowing robes of deep blue and silver. Rings on each other his fingers and magical trinkets hanging from his neck, ears and forehead.

Brought up to think of myself as being the lowliest of the low, I'd never realised my people could achieve some semblance of power through the use of magic and other fine arts.

That was, as they say, a real eye opener.

My life wasn't all bad though.

Master Belaern had been more patient with me than most.

Teaching me the spoken language of the drow and educating me in the rudimentary basics of the written language, I was raised up by a rather kindhearted -by drow standards- Master.

When he died, I was devastated.

The relationship I had with him wasn't like that of a father and son, at least not the way I understood it. He was like a mentor to me, and although his beatings and lessons left many a mark on my young mind and body, he never failed to reward me by teaching me new things.

Then he died and I was taken away and sold.  
Things were very different after that.

The second Master I had was a rothé farmer.

I didn't even know his name and had virtually no contact with him.

The superior I reported to during the six month farming assignment was a one-eyed hobgoblin by the name of Tathrak...or something like that.

Anyways, the job was tedious and unrewarding to say the least.  
We were fed on scraps and given roughly six hours to sleep per day. Sometimes less than that.

I was so very glad when my loan contract came to an end.

I had no idea how or when the transaction had occured, but one day I woke up and was escorted out of the lower tiers of the city.

I was thirteen at that time, and spent the next three years serving as a kitchen aid and house servant at one of the many schools of wizardry the city had to offer. 

This was not the life of luxury, but I was fed much better than I'd been at the rothé farm and the bedding accomodations were somewhat more comfortable as well.

Sacks of dried hay instead of stone floors.

There was also more light here than in most places.  
It made things quite a bit easier for me in the long run.

My sixteen hour shifts usually involved cleaning and helping the half-orcish cooks over in the kitchen. 

There were quite a few mages and student mages at the tower where I was stationed.

The apprentices were exceedingly nasty with us, but as hard as this was to believe, the older mages were generally quite a bit more lenient.

Not with all the slave, of course. The various goblinoid creatures I worked with still got the short end of the stick, so to speak.

Some of the mages were unecessarily cruel in their experiments. And more than once, I'd see a fellow slave worker being turned into a living, breathing abomination or splayed open as a study subject.

Like I said, I was luckier than most.

Some of the drow Masters were okay with me.  
One in particular, who went by the name of Master Seldszar, was especially kind.

To this day, it still remains a mystery as far as what he hoped to gain from it, but every now and then when I'd clean out his personal quarters, he'd give me some sweet tasting fruits from the surface and other sugary treats.

I could tell my expressions of gratitude were very foreign to him, yet he never gave me the impression he didn't enjoy them.

In any case, my time at the arcane tower ended when I became too brazen and confident with my station.

I'd spent months sneaking books and papers into the slave barracks and reading texts when the other occupants were asleep.

Some of the stuff I read, I couldn't make heads of tails off.  
But one book in particular spoke of the surface and featured some highly detailed pictures of the world above, complete with maps and information about it's people.

I was mesmerized by what I saw.

Being favoured by the drow Masters didn't only come with advantages though.

Instead of making me more popular with the slaves, I became an outcast among the work force, and was eventually ratted out by a particularly annoying Xvart who kept pestering me.

When he appeared in the barracks with two drow Masters behind him, I knew I'd overstepped my bounds.

The stupid runt probably expected me to be flogged, molestested, beaten and killed, but no such thing ended up happening.

The books and manuscripts I'd borrowed were confiscated, and less than two days later, I was sold off as a waiter to an all-male tavern in the city's market district.

Suffice to say, the luxurious inn was no place for a sixteen-year-old boy to find employment.

Let me explain.


End file.
